Our wholesale side has had a lot of clients recently asking to try and save their corten steel. All of these clients used homemade weathering cocktails that they had found on the Internet.

What went wrong?

To get the chemical reaction effect, these internet recipes usually tell people to make cocktails using vinegar and salt. This does cause a chemical reaction in the weathered steel, but there are a few problems with this.

The most important thing to know is that it's hard to control how quickly and when the reaction happens when you're using home-made cocktails. The great instability makes it hard for customers to judge how much the chemical reaction is happening and to take the right action.

Secondly, home-made cocktails not only cause chemical reactions on the surface, but also penetrate into the steel. This is very difficult to remove completely with surface cleaners. When you need to seal it, some of the cocktail residue gets sealed into the coating. This residue reacts over time and eventually breaks through the sealing layer from the inside, creating unsightly scars or flaking.

Some internet recipes even tell people to use wood varnish or car wax to seal and protect the steel at the end of weathering, but this will completely ruin the effect. Incompatible coatings usually don't provide full protection and can even cause colour changes or surface breakage due to problems with water absorption, adhesion and flexibility.

Our team of certified engineers have repaired lots of corten steel that has been damaged by incompatible coatings like the one shown above. This has been really difficult and expensive to fix.

Lessons learnt:

Always use XL-08 professional weathering accelerator. This has been proven in numerous experiments to be stable and controllable, both in terms of the rate and effect of rusting, and in terms of the ability to be neutralised after rusting.

Always neutralise with Prep505 and clean steel surfaces after using the XL-08 accelerator to stop the corrosion process.

As soon as the patina reaches the desired aesthetics, end the weathering and apply the correct protective coating such as CT-7571.

If you have a one-stop-shop requirement from preparation, weathering, neutralisation to sealing, our kits can give you the right and consistent full range of products. Please click on the link below to explore.